Family life, on a budget.

Main menu

Tag Archives: saving

This blog had a bit of what I think you call a “soft start” back in 2017. I bought the domain, managed a few posts and then all went very, very quiet. I had a need to start saving like mad, but that was all I could reveal at the time.

There was a reason behind the silence though – the last six months have seen me move house and get divorced, so understandably my priorities have been making sure that my kids are OK and getting on with dealing with all the emotional and physical demands of everything that has been going on. I kept blogging over on my main blog as it was my main income stream at the time, but I’ve not had a huge amount of time to push forwards with future plans.

New year, new start though.

2018 is the year that I need to save like never before. At the moment my new partner and I are living in a tiny two bedroom rented flat. It’s really convenient for my kids’ school and the neighbours and general area are lovely, but it’s a tiny place to have five of us living there part of the time. The kids desperately need their own rooms and we all just need more space. Working from home makes it particularly difficult, hence I’m spending a huge amount of time working in coffee shops instead. And then there’s the battle with black mould that we seem to be constantly losing.

The main thing that we want to achieve in 2018 is to buy ourselves a home. I’ve already sold the house I had with my ex-husband, and my OH is in the process of selling his old house too. Once that is done, we’ll have a sizeable deposit, but as we need to stay close to my kids school (they live with me 50% of the time) and close to his daughter, we are a bit limited in where we can choose to live. And that area doesn’t happen to be cheap.

The plan therefore is to do everything in as thrifty a way as possible. We’re not yet sure how big a mortgage we can get together, but as I’m self employed I realise that they will look at my earnings over a few years and, as I wasn’t working full time, the figures don’t look great. It may therefore be that the mortgage is based on just one income.

We also realise that moving house has costs associated with it already and there are bound to be new things that we need when we move, plus the prospect of having to do work to any place that we can afford to buy.

Whilst going through all this we both want to keep things as normal as possible for the kids. We don’t want any of them to go without, so we need to tighten our belts as much as we can when they’re not with us, and try to make what money we have go as far as possible.

Hence my challenge for 2018 – to save as much money as possible.

I’ve found before that saving goals are so much easier when you’re telling people about them. You’re generally less likely to spend money unnecessarily if you have to declare to readers what you’re doing as you go along. I therefore plan to share my savings with you all here. I’m not planning a full breakdown of every penny that I spend, but I do plan to tell you about all the pennies that I manage to save. Whether that be through buying things we need in sales, finding discount vouchers, cheaper alternatives or cash back offers. I’ve been honing these skills over the last six months and I like to think that I’m becoming a bit of a pro.

The question is, can I save enough for us to set up a family home together properly? I’m hoping that by this time next year I’ll have the answer for you.